Prince Of Lies

As she thought this over, wondering how an amused voice could be so detached, the mattress beside her sank, and to her appalled astonishment she felt the covers twitch. Sheer shock jackknifed her upright.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she demanded in a high, shrill voice, staring with dilated eyes as he turned to look at her.

‘I’m making myself comfortable,’ he said mockingly, crystalline eyes gleaming. ‘You can’t expect to hog the covers, you know. It’s bad manners.’

‘You’re not—’

He interrupted with unexpected curtness, ‘Stephanie, you’re quite safe. I’m sleeping here, that’s all.’

‘But what—then why—?’

He said reasonably, ‘Although I’m almost certain no one is watching this place, I believe in caution, so I’m working on the assumption that we’re under surveillance. The last thing we need is for anyone to realise that there are two people living here now. So we act like one person. We sleep together, we move around the house together; when you’re in the bathroom, I’ll be next door with the light out. I’m going to stick as close to you as a shadow, princess, closer than a lover, but I’m not going to touch you.’

When Stephanie gathered her wits enough to object, he didn’t let her get more than a word out before finishing with a steely authority that silenced her, ‘Rules of the house, princess; don’t knock them—they might save your brother a lot of money and both of us quite a bit of trouble.’

The problem was that she understood. Having grown up in a small English village, she knew too well just what a hotbed of gossip such places were, and how by some osmosis everyone learned in an astonishingly short time all about everyone else.

But although his logic made sense, a wary feminine apprehension rejected it. The close, constant proximity he insisted on was going to be an enormous strain on her. She pulled the duvet around her body, trembling in spite of the mild temperature. ‘No! I’ll be very careful—’

‘I’m not suggesting this, or giving you power of veto. You have no choice, so you’ll avoid unnecessary stress if you just accept it.’

His voice remained cool, almost indifferent, but she heard the curbed irritation buried in the words as well as the implacable resolution. She gulped. ‘I don’t want to!’

‘Stephanie, if you’re afraid that I won’t be able to control my lust, rest assured that I am not attracted to thin, gangly schoolgirls, even when they have indecent amounts of money as well as big, innocent cornflower eyes and a mouth as soft as roses.’

No contempt coloured his voice, nothing but that steady detachment, yet each word was a tiny whip scoring her skin, her heart, as it was intended to be.

She retorted obstinately, ‘I’m not sleeping in this bed if you are.’

Unimpressed, he said, ‘Then sleep on the floor; I don’t give a damn. But just in case you’re stupid enough to run around the house putting lights on, I’ll tie you to the bed-leg first.’

Stephanie bit down on a gasp of outrage. Her gaze flew to his face; she read an implacable, unwavering purpose there. He meant every word. If she made up a bed for herself on the floor he would shackle her. At that moment, ensnared in the ice of his eyes, she hated him with every part of her soul.

However, two could play the game of threat and counterthreat. Her lips tightened. ‘Saul won’t like that.’

He directed a hard, level stare at her. ‘Your brother will have to accept that I know what I’m doing.’

Flinging caution to the wind, she said rashly, ‘He can ruin your career.’

As soon as she’d said the words she’d realised it wouldn’t work, but she hadn’t expected the deadly silence that followed. When he spoke his voice was slow and even and truly terrifying.

‘Perhaps we’d better get one thing straight,’ he said. ‘I am not afraid of or intimidated by your brother. I never have been, and I don’t plan to be in the future. In your world, princess, money might mean power. In mine it doesn’t. Now lie down and shut up before I say something I might regret.’

More than anything in the world she needed to make some gesture, prove that he couldn’t make her do what he wanted, but something in his stance, in the way his crystalline gaze met her rebellious eyes, something in the remote, chillingly indifferent face with its angular bone-structure and complete absence of softness or compassion, warned her not to try.

Defeated, she shuddered, almost swamped by the fear she had fought so valiantly. He was as callous as the kidnappers, finding the right buttons, pushing them relentlessly.

‘Very well,’ she said, striving for dignified self-possession, ‘but using physical strength is just as despicable as using money to force anyone to do what you want them to.’

‘I suppose it’s your privileged upbringing,’ he said conversationally, ‘that means you don’t know when to stop,’ and before she realised what he was doing he caught her wrist in a grip just short of painful and leaned over and kissed her with a merciless mouth, crushing her objections, her worry and fear to nothing.

It was over in a moment. As she dragged painful air into her lungs, he stared at her with eyes as cold as shards of diamonds and said beneath his breath, ‘God, what the hell are you doing to me?’

Stephanie’s world had turned upside-down, been wrenched from its foundations by a kiss, as it had not been by the preceding nightmarish days. For a lifetime, for an aeon encompassed by the space between two heartbeats, she was captured by those eyes, dragged into a world where winter reigned supreme. This man, whoever he was, moved and breathed like a human being, but, in spite of his gentleness and care for her, at his heart was a core of primeval ice.

The prince of ice, she thought, trying to be flippant, an effort spoiled by foreboding.

‘Turn over and get to sleep,’ he ordered in that quiet, lethal voice.

Silently she turned her back on him and crawled beneath the covers, enveloped by the instant warmth of down. Tense and resistant, she huddled on the edge of the bed. Heat prickled across her skin, suffused every cell in her body. For the first time in her life she felt a tug of desire in her loins, a strange sensation in her breasts as though they were expanding.

Stop it, she adjured her unruly mind fiercely; stop it this minute. But she couldn’t, until finally she fell back on a childhood remedy for unpleasant thoughts and strove to block out the images that danced behind her retinas with a concerted attack on the seven times table.

Out of the darkness he said, ‘I’m sorry, that shouldn’t have happened, and it won’t be repeated. You needn’t be afraid that I’ll jump you again.’

She couldn’t answer; touching her tongue to lips that were tender and dry, she wondered why his kiss should have had such an effect on her. Beyond the somewhat inexpert embraces of several boys not much older than she was, she had nothing to judge it by. Oh, she’d had crushes, but her brother’s overwhelming masculinity made other men seem pale and ineffectual, and it had been difficult to let down the barriers of her mind and heart to anyone less compelling than Saul.

Also, her very protective brother made sure that she was kept well away from anyone who might view his younger sister as a tempting morsel. Consequently, most of her friends at school were far more experienced than she was.

Although their family had always been rich, and grown even richer under Saul’s capable hands, he wasn’t a member of the jet set. He despised people who didn’t work, and because he was deeply in love with his wife he preferred to spend the time he had to spare with her and their children. Stephanie, too, loved being with the half-sister she had come to know so late in her childhood, and adored being a favourite aunt. Saul, she knew, kept a close eye on her friends, so although she had spent holidays with schoolfriends she had never gone anywhere except with people he had known and trusted.

Which meant, she thought, as she lay rigidly in the bed, that she was pretty naïve. If she’d been more sophisticated she wouldn’t now be so overwhelmed by the powerful charisma of the man who lay beside her in the huge bed.

And perhaps she had been conditioned to look for that concentrated authority in a man; growing up with Saul had persuaded her that there could be kindness and love in a man of imperious character.

Exhaustion gripped her in unrelenting claws, but she couldn’t sleep. Acutely aware of every tiny movement her rescuer made, of the length of his body next to hers, of the sound of his breathing, the tantalising, seductive heat of his body, her nerves sang like tightened bowstrings.

She didn’t even know his name, and here she was sharing a bed with him!

Resentment simmered, encouraged because it blocked out the strange equivocal warmth seeping through her body. She despised men who thought their superior strength gave them the right to dominate.

And she hated the fact that he was able to sleep when she couldn’t.

He’d probably shared a bed more times than she could count. Like Saul, who had been unmercifully pursued for as long as she could remember, the man who slept beside her possessed a smouldering sexuality that every woman would recognise. Squelching a mysterious pang, Stephanie lay longing for him to snore. It would demystify him, make him an ordinary man.

Of course he didn’t. Eventually her muscles protested vigorously at being locked in stasis; giving in to them, she turned over on to her back, moving inch by careful inch in case she woke him. He didn’t stir, but her change of position had brought her closer, and she scorched in the heat from his body. Surely all men weren’t as hot as that? He certainly didn’t have a fever, so perhaps he lived on a fiercer, more intense plane than other men.

Hastily, she turned back again.

‘Stop thrashing about,’ he commanded, his voice cool and slightly amused.

‘Goodnight,’ she muttered through clenched teeth.

Strangely enough, sleep reclaimed her then, but with it returned the dreams. Unable either to banish them or allow them to take her over completely, she fought back, and woke to find herself once more in his arms, that cruel hand clamped over her mouth again to cut off her screams.

At last, when it had happened three times, he said brusquely, ‘Right, that’s it. No, don’t scuttle back to your side of the bed.’ His arms tightened around her; one large hand pushed her head into the warm, hard muscles of his shoulder. ‘Stay there,’ he ordered.

‘All right,’ she said in the flat tone of exhaustion.